As part of the endless efforts of conservatives to treat the last two election debacles as aberrations in a “center-right nation” (or as somehow-conservative reactions to that godless freespending liberal George W. Bush), you can expect some reaction to the latest Gallup survey of the ideological self-identifications of Americans. It shows a slight uptick in “conservative” self-identification during 2009, up to 40% from 37% last year. But it’s basically the same findings almost always found in recent decades when voters are offered the three choices of “conservative,” “liberal” and “moderate.” Self-identified “conservatives” have been bumping around 40% since 1992, with “liberals” around 20% and “moderates” holding the balance. Moreover, Gallup confirms the very old news that Republicans are heavily conservative (73% “conservative,” 24% “moderate” and 3% “liberal”), while Democrats are more ideologically diverse (40% “moderate,” 38% “liberal” and 22% “conservative”).
There’s no real evidence here that anything’s changed since November of 2008.
And as always, the C-M-L choice doesn’t seem to tell us as much as more nuanced measurements of ideology. The big recent Center for American Progress study released in March, State of Political Ideology, 2009, added “libertarian” and “progressive” to the usual menu of self-identification options, and after pushing leaners, found that 47% of Americans think of themselves as progressive or liberal, while 48% self-identify as conservative or libertarian. The CAP survey also found that when you probe deeper in terms of more specific statements of values and beliefs, there’s a reasonably solid progressive majority when it comes to most matters of international and domestic policy. The conservative “brand” may still be relatively strong, but it doesn’t always translate into issue positions, much less voting behavior.
Virtually everyone agrees that the long-stable C-M-L findings disguise generational trends that are worth watching closely. The new Gallup survey finds that “liberals” outnumber “conservatives” by a 31%-30% margin among voters under 30. And a May analysis by CAP on “millennials” shows 44% self-identifying as progressive or liberal, and just 28% as conservative or libertarian.
None of this, of course, will deter “center-right nation” fans from claiming the latest Gallup survey as evidence that Americans were misled during the last two election cycles, or were offered insufficiently stark ideological choices, or were simply tired of George W. Bush and will return to the Republican Party almost automatically in 2010 or 2012. This argument is essential to the conservative project of keeping the GOP firmly on the Right, or driving it even further Right. When you are a hammer, everything–and certainly every poll–looks like a nail.

In The Hill today, Aaron Blake has a story about an important but little-discussed phenomenon that’s shaping the landscape for U.S. House campaigns in 2010: candidate calculations about the impact of redistricting after 2010:

As they enter a key decision-making phase of the 2010 election cycle, the chance that they will encounter a very different map in 2012 could serve as both a deterrent and motivation to go for it.
For some, 2010 might be their last best hope to win a given district before it is shored up by redistricting, while others might want to wait for the post-redistricting election, when the grass could be greener thanks to a friendly reapportionment process.

The go-for-broke temptation that Blake mentions refers to the strong tendency of legislatures to protect congressional incumbents, sometimes including those from the opposite party (often voters from the same party of a strong incumbent are “packed” into his or her district to make neighboring districts friendlier to the other party). Incubment-protection is a particularly strong impulse in those many situations where neither party completely controls redistricting.
But sometimes circumstances cut in the opposite direction:

Since redistricting often aims to shore up incumbents, it’s rare that it leads to better takeover opportunities. But that could be the case with members like Reps. Dennis Moore (D-Kan.), Peter King (R-N.Y.) or any number of vulnerable Illinois Republicans.
King and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who are weighing Senate runs, could actually be encouraged to run for statewide office because of the upcoming changes to their tenuous districts, which are likely to be handled by Democrats.

All in all, the wait-and-see tendency is naturally strong, since incumbents tend to settle into their districts between redistricting cycles. Moreover, among challengers, no one wants to risk an entire career to win a House seat and then see the district become unwinnable after just one term. Here’s Blake’s bottom line for 2010:

Overall, history shows that the number of quality challengers who emerge to run for Congress declines as redistricting maps become more entrenched, with the final election before redistricting – 2010, in this case – having the fewest quality challengers.
Vanderbilt political science professor Marc Hetherington, who has also studied redistricting’s effect on candidates, said the upcoming election cycle could be something of an exception, given the number of Republican seats that have flipped Democratic the last two elections.

It’s worth remembering that state legislatures are also redistricting themselves even as they draw congressional district lines. And that can have strange and interesting impllications, as Blake explains:

In perhaps the weirdest redistricting conundrum in the country, state Sen. Darrel Aubertine is a Democratic favorite to run in the upcoming special election for Army Secretary-designate Rep. John McHugh’s (R) upstate seat. But Aubertine could be risking his party’s control over redistricting by giving up his state Senate seat to run for Congress.
The Democratic majority in the Empire State’s upper chamber was always tenuous, but Monday’s coup by 30 Republicans and two Democrats put everything in focus. The 30 remaining Democrats will be fighting hard to regain their majority status and, provided Democrats retain the governor’s mansion, control congressional redistricting.
Aubertine’s district is one of the most difficult they hold. So, in effect, he could actually help his party win more congressional seats by staying in the state Senate.

As is often the case with redistricting cycles, candidate calculations going into 2010 may well involve many games of three-dimensional chess around the country. That complicates the national picture significantly.

Most Democrats understand the downside of winning elections and then being held accountable for conditions in the country they did not produce. Consider the endless talk about the federal budget deficits in the Obama administration’s first budget. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times explained yesterday, Obama inherited most of the red ink from Bush policies and from the recession (indeed, as Jonathan Chait argues, Leonhardt may have actually underestimated that inheritance). But it’s considered poor form for Democrats to keep “blaming Bush,” doncha know.
One often underestimated benefit of holding the White House, though, is the extraordinary power and visibility of the Bully Pulpit. And that factor is nicely illustrated by a new Gallup survey that shows Americans clearly think of Barack Obama as the leader of the Democratic Party, while having little idea whom to treat as the leader of the opposition.
Worse yet, the three people most often cited by Gallup respondents in an open-ended question about the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today” are Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich; 29% named one of these three gents (as did 29% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats). These are precisely the three “spokesmen” most Democrats would wish on the GOP. But that may overstate their prominence: a remarkable 46% of Republicans and GOP-leaners in the poll either couldn’t name a party leader or asserted there wasn’t one.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is considered the main Democratic spokesman by two-thirds of Democrats and 58% of Americans generally. The latter number is as low as it is because fully 20% of Republicans (but only 6% of Democrats) named Nancy Pelosi as the main Democratic voice, reflecting the obsession of conservative media with the House Speaker.
This situation obviously helps the president serve as a messenger and agenda-setter for the Democratic Party. But it also helps explain the hyper-partisan and ideologically rigid atmosphere among would-be Republican “spokesmen,” who are competing for attention by focusing on the hard-core conservative base. It’s enough to drive a party crazy.

Perhaps this is a dog-bites-man story these days, but remarks by putative 2012 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee in Iowa yesterday really do illustrate the delusional belief of Republican conservatives that they are struggling against high odds to keep their party from completely endorsing Barack Obama’s agenda:

“I hear people who give advice that the Republicans need to moderate. They need to be a little more to the left,” Huckabee said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It sounds like advice that Democrats would give to us so that we’d never win another election ever.”
Some argue that Republicans have lost Congress and the White House because they’ve turned the party over to social and religious conservatives, driving away moderates and independents. Huckabee made precisely the opposite argument.
“It’s when they move to the mushy middle and get squishy that they get beat,” he said….
“Historically, the way we’ve found our way back to winning, having clear convictions that are conservative and then when elected, act like it,” he said. “In every election, when Republicans have had clarity of convictions and those convictions were conservative, they win.”
He warned that many Republicans have gone astray by buying into President Barack Obama’s big-spending effort to stimulate the economy, a move he called “a big, colossal, utterly disastrous mistake.”

It’s hard to know where to begin in mocking this nonsense. Let’s start with Huckabee’s understanding of what’s true “historically.” As I recall, Republicans had a “clarity of convictions and those convictions were conservative” in 1964, and they lost in a very big landslide. Four years later, Richard Nixon ran as a sort of center-right “unity” figure, and won in a narrow plurality. In 1972, Nixon got his landslide after instituting wage and price controls, recognizing China, pumping up the economy with his own version of “stimulus,” cutting a major arms deal with the Soviet Union that led conservatives to “suspend” their support for him, and supporting clean air and clean water legislation (he also lied about the war, demonized “liberal elites” and bugged and harrassed his “enemies,” but he was nothing if not inconsistent on every ideological issue). Yes, Reagan won a bare majority in 1980, and then won his own landslide after approving two taxes increases and “caving” to “liberals” on major cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Bush gained office in 2000 with the help of the Supreme Court after promising to be a “uniter, not a divider,” who would make conservatism “compassionate,” and then was narrowly re-elected after promoting all those things (No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Rx Drug Benefit, immigration reform) that are now being denounced by conservatives as a “betrayal” of principle.
Huckabee’s peddling revisionist history of the rankest kind.
But even more ridiculous is the claim that lots of Republicans are clamoring to move to the “mushy middle.” Since the last presidential campaign got underway, Republicans have abandoned their long-time support for the earned income tax credit (now called “redistribution” or “socialism”) and their reluctant acceptance of global climate change as real (now denounced once again as a hoax), and have thoroughly exterminated any GOP interest in comprehensive immigration reform. They have adopted a partisan rhetoric that makes Karl Rove look temperate, punctuated by an actual debate by their national committee of the idea of demanding that Democrats start calling themselves the “Democrat Socialist Party.” As for the stimulus package, no House Republicans voted for it; one of the three Senate Republicans who voted for it after securing major concessions has since left the GOP. Two GOP governors, routinely denounced as RINOs, endorsed it (Ah-nold and Charlie Crist). For Huckabee, these tiny signs of dissent are a terrible threat. To use an old southern expression, he and other conservatives are goosing a ghost.
I don’t know why conservatives persist in this delusion, and just acknowlege that they are totally calling the shots in the Republican Party today. But the fiction of a major ideological battle is getting pretty old.

The murder yesterday at the Holocaust Museum, following so soon after the murder of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller, is rightly making people wonder what’s going on in our country. Are two politically motivated homicides in so short a period a coincidence? And if not, how do we avoid falling into paranoid states of mind that lead us to unfairly associate non-violence Americans with violent acts?
As it happens, James Vega did a prescient and useful piece on this subject for TDS back in April, entitled: “What is ‘right-wing extremism,'” motivated by the now-famous Department of Homeland Security study that had conservatives howling in outrage. Here was his most fundamental point about the distinction between “extremist” and “non-extremist” politics.

Underlying all extremist political ideologies is one central idea – the vision of “politics as warfare”. While this phrase is widely used as a metaphor, political extremists mean it in an entirely concrete and operational way. It is a view that is codified in the belief that political opponents are literally “enemies” who must be crushed rather than fellow Americans with different opinions with whom negotiated political compromises must be sought.

In terms of right-wing extremism, says Vega, there are separate but mutually reinforcing military and religious world-views that can lead to this treatment of opponents as “enemies” who merit annihilation, the first adopting the rules of engagement of warfare, and the second involving a literal demonization of opponents. And this process of legitimizing violence can begin with the sort of violent rhetoric heard so often on the airwaves and across the internet.
It’s important, as Vega reminds us, to separate the sheep from the goats and not blame conservatives for right-wing violence. But no matter how respectable the voices involved, when people adopt the language of warfare, they need to be called out:

Many conservative groups object to being lumped together with violent extremists, and argue that even their most intense and radical opposition to Obama does not make them violent political extremists.
In fact, they are entirely correct. What distinguishes “political extremism” from other concepts like “the radical right” or “hard-right conservatism” is the following:
1. The two ideological pillars on which genuine political extremism rests are the notions of “politics as warfare” and of political opponents as “enemies”. Groups which reject these notions are not political extremists,
2. Political extremism becomes dangerous and violent whenever and wherever these two notions are taken literally.
What should Democrats do? Basically, there needs to be clear and resolute pushback against these two notions. When politicians or others use the notions of “politics as war,” and “liberals and Democrats as enemies”, Democrats have to clearly and forcefully object. They have to stop the discussion dead in its tracks and say.
“No, you are profoundly wrong. Politics is not warfare and Americans with whom we disagree are not “enemies”. We totally reject these ideas. In fact, that’s one of the most fundamental differences between you and us and we think it is a major reason why most Americans now support Obama. You actually believe that you are literally at war with every single American who does not agree with you. We don’t think that way, and most Americans don’t either.

Let’s hope this way of stopping the incitement of violence in politics catches on before tragedies and outrages become all too common-place.

So what really happened in yesterday’s Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary? In a sentence, Creigh Deeds trounced the two early front-runners in nearly every part of the state, despite notable disadvantages in organization and (versus Terry McAuliffe, at least) money. His campaign saved the money it had, spent it on well-placed TV ads, and peaked at exactly the right time, winning the bulk of undecided voters down the stretch and battening on growing voter dissatisfaction with his rivals.
As Ari Berman points out today at The Nation, there was almost certainly an element of the old murder-suicide scenario at play: Brian Moran spent a lot of time attacking Terry McAuliffe, driving up T-Mac’s already high negatives and souring voters on himself as Deeds quietly went about campaigning.
But it’s not enough to intone “murder-suicide” and forget about the whole thing. The remarkable aspect of the contest was that Deeds defied the heavily-subscribed-to belief that the “ground game” is what matters most in low turnout primaries. Yes, turnout was a bit higher than expected (320,000 votes instead of 250,000), but was still low by almost any standard other than VA’s weak history of competitive primaries. Moran was all about “mobilization” and McAuliffe threw lots of his money into the “ground game,” even as Deeds was laying off field staff. Yet Deeds won ten of eleven congressional districts (losing narrowly to the Macker in the majority-black 3d district that runs from Richmond to Hampton Roads), winning NoVa against two rivals from that region. Some pundits attribute Deeds’ success in NoVa to his endorsement by the Washington Post, but while that endorsement was well-timed and helped provide a psychological boost to the Deeds campaign, everything we know about elections suggests that newspaper endorsements don’t matter a great deal.
In other words, what the candidates actually had to say in their ads, their mailers, their debates, and their personal appearances actually had a lot to do with the results–an once-popular idea that deserves a second look now and then. (See Amy Walters’ breakdown on the percentage of candidate expenditures on direct voter contact via ads and mail, where Deeds excelled).
Was there an ideological twist to this primary? That’s hard to say, without exit polls. Moran definitely tried to position himself as the “true progressive” in the race, opposing a big coal plant in southeast VA, stressing his eagerness to overturn the state’s gay marriage ban, and hiring some high-profile netroots figures like Joe Trippi and Jerome Armstrong. Moran also tried to identify himself with those who supported Barack Obama against McAuliffe’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, in last year’s presidential primaries (not very successfully, given T-Mac’s relatively strong showing among African-Americans yesterday). And both Moran and McAuliffe went after Deeds very hard during the last week or so on Deeds’ record of opposition to gun control measures.
In a state like Virginia, though, even self-conscious progressives tend to cut statewide candidates a lot of slack, so the ideological issues with Deeds may have helped him marginally.
The silliest conclusion I’ve heard since last night, though, is that McAuliffe’s defeat somehow represents the “end of Clintonism” in the Democratic Party. Sure, the Big Dog himself campaigned for McAuliffe to no apparent avail, and if “Clintonism” means no more than the personalities connected with the Clintons in the past, then maybe the results were a blow to “Clintonism.” But if, as I suspect is the case, those who are celebrating the “end of Clintonism” are talking about “centrism” or efforts to appeal beyond the progressive Democratic base, it’s kinda hard not to notice that the winning candidate yesterday seems to most resemble that profile. And there’s no question at all that the areas of Virginia actually won by HRC in 2008 went heavily for Deeds.
If you missed all the very brief excitement over VA last night, you can check out the liveblogging that Nate Silver and I did over at 538.com. And I also did some analysis of turnout patterns in VA today. Now it’s on to November, and no matter what you think of Creigh Deeds, he does enter the general election contest with some momentum and a demonstrated ability to pull votes from pretty much everywhere.
UPDATE: John Judis povides a more thoroughgoing analysis of the “end of Clintonism” interpretation of yesterday’s results than I did, but reaches a similar conclusion. In the meantime, given the prominent roles played in Brian Moran’s campaign by netroots gurus Trippi and Armstrong, and his adoption of many elements of netroots CW on how to win a low-turnout primary, you have to wonder why nobody’s asking if Moran’s third-place finish signals the “end of the netroots.” Maybe that’s because this whole “death by association” theme is ridiculous, whether we are talking about Moran or McAuliffe.

Let’s say you’re running a gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, and you want turnout in Northern Virginia to be relatively high. This is probably not the early-morning headline you want to see in the Washington Post: “Severe Thunderstorms Hit As Polls Open in VA.” The story beneath that headline says that in some areas experiencing hail, radio stations are telling residents to stay indoors, presumably even if that van shows up to take you to the polls.
For whatever reason, it looks like God had some definite ideas about turnout patterns in Virginia today.

Virginia’s Democrats are holding a primary today, and the headliner event is the contest to see who will face Republican Bob McDonnell in November in an effort to secure a third straight Democratic governorship. As Jonathan Martin of Politico explains this morning, there are scenarios under which each of the three candidates–Creigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran–could win, with turnout being a crucial variable. But Deeds has been the surprise leader in all four of the polls released during the last week.
I have a post up at fivethirtyeight.com that explores some of the issues we may be discussing when the returns are in, including the ancient debate between mobilization and persuasion strategies; the role of timely media endorsements; and Virginia’s relatively restrictive early voting rules, which Gov. Kaine unsuccessfully tried to change this year.
The polls in VA close at 7:00 p.m.; the whole state’s in the eastern time zone; and given the expected low turnout, we may have a result pretty early unless it’s very close.